Self care in the age of Trump

I am not good at this. It seems the news (the real news, not the fake news) happens so fast and changes from hour to hour. I tend to want to stay glued to CNN or PBS. But that is soul sapping these days. The feelings of being powerless and frustrated and angry are real. I make daily phone calls to Washington. I sign petitions. I haven’t yet gone to a march but boy did I want to last Sunday, when O’Hare was the site of peaceful protests against the travel ban.

There are moments when I see some brightness. This has stripped away our apathy and people have found their voices. But the disfunction and dismantling of our way of life is disheartening and scary.

I can’t hide and pretend it isn’t happening. That might be easier but that solves nothing.

But in the midst of all this, it rapidly becomes too much. So I need to be diligent with self care. There are times, or even days, when I need to turn off the news. Where I need to walk in the forest preserve. When I need to play music or lose myself in a good book.

Then when my soul is soothed I can rejoin. I can listen and encourage and plan. When I can read the news and educated myself. When I can act out of the certainty that if we don’t act, we will awake in a country we no longer recognize.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.Martin Luther King,Jr.